The Medici Conspiracy (50 page)

Finally, this:

This was the fruit of hours of phone taps. Usually, tombaroli—and even more so the capi zona—are careful what they say on the phone but, from time to time, the beauty of their discoveries gets the better of them. It was these slips, and the concurrences between them, that convicted Monticelli.

In June 2003, Vaman Ghiya was arrested in India after a six-month undercover operation by Indian police. Mr. Ghiya (see the Note on p. 386) was an Indian equivalent of Medici. He was mentioned in the documents James Hodges had leaked to the authors as someone who smuggled Indian antiquities out of the subcontinent and imported them—via companies such as Megavena and Cape Lion Logging in Switzerland—on their way to being sold at Sotheby's.

“Operation Blackhole” involved several policemen posing as beggars and rickshaw drivers stationed outside unguarded temples, on the lookout for thieves. Anand Srivastava, the superintendent in charge of the investigation, said that Ghiya had admitted to illegally smuggling more
than 100 items that featured in catalogs of Sotheby's auctions that were discovered in a raid on his house. In particular, Ghiya was charged with stealing and smuggling a twelfth-century red sandstone statue from the Vilasgarth temple in September 1999, which was sold at Sotheby's in New York on September 22, 2000.

In June 2004, Ali Aboutaam was sentenced, in absentia, to fifteen years' imprisonment in Egypt for artifacts smuggling. This was part of a large initiative by the Egyptians to curb the illicit traffic, and Ali Aboutaam was one of about thirty people rounded up—including an influential politician, customs officers, police colonels, and people in charge of antiquities. The politician was given a thirty-five-year prison term, and nine foreigners—from Switzerland, France, Canada, Kenya, and Morocco—were also convicted, several in their absence.

Ali Aboutaam considered the verdicts “totally absurd.” He had learned about his conviction, he told reporters, from the press. He had never received any communication from the Egyptian legal system, and although Egyptian magistrates had visited Switzerland three times in the course of their investigations, they had never contacted him. He said the only evidence against him, so far as he could see, was that one of his calling cards had been left at the home of the prominent politician who subsequently received the thirty-five-year jail sentence. Ali Aboutaam admitted to talking on the phone with the politician but added, “There are so many people who contact me to offer me ancient objects.” He said he had been accused by the Egyptian press of smuggling artifacts out of Egypt, but no one had specified what, when, and where such offenses had been committed. Thus, he said, “I have nothing to do with this story.”

In the very same week, Ali Aboutaam's brother, Hischam, pleaded guilty in New York to a federal charge that he had falsified a customs document about the origins of an ancient silver ceremonial drinking vessel that his gallery later sold for $950,000. He had been arrested the previous December for importing an Iranian object, described as “the most important representation of a griffin in antiquity” and for facilitating its sale to a private collector. The antiquity in question was alleged to have been part
of the plundered Iranian Western Cave Treasure, said to have been looted in 1992 and dispersed around the world. The silver griffin, dated to c. 700 BC, was falsely stated as coming from Syria. According to the complaint filed in the court, the prominent collector began discussions about the object in Geneva, in 1999, discussions that included Hischam's brother, Ali. Mr. Aboutaam told the buyer at that meeting that the griffin was originally from Iran. The griffin was hand-carried into the United States by Mr. Aboutaam, and the importer of record was listed as the Bloomfield Collection. The invoice declaring Syria as the country of origin was issued by Tanis Antiquities Ltd., based in the Grenadine Islands and an affiliate of Phoenix Ancient Art. The complaint noted that Syria and Iran do not share a border. The griffin was examined by three experts to attest its authenticity, two of whom had given as their opinion that it formed part of the Western Cave Treasure.
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Coincidentally (this was a busy time for the Aboutaams), Phoenix Ancient Art was the source of a bronze statue of Apollo slaying a lizard, purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Experts were divided as to whether the statue was a Greek original or a Roman copy, but they were even more divided over the propriety of Cleveland's acquisition because of the gaps in the statue's provenance. Allegedly, the bronze was discovered lying on the ground when a retired German lawyer successfully reclaimed his family estate in the former East Germany in the 1990s. For some archaeologists this was just too convenient.

In early 2005, two Greek journalists, Andreas Apostolides and Nikolas Zirganos, broadcast the result of a four-year investigation carried out in conjunction with one of the authors of this book (Peter Watson) into the smuggling of ancient artifacts out of Greece. The investigation was wideranging,
but in part, it focused on familiar names—George Ortiz, Elia Borowsky, Nikolas Koutoulakis, and Christoph Leon.

Yiannis Sakellerakis, one of the best-known archaeologists in Greece, said in a TV program on antiquities that a tomb robber had admitted to him to looting two bronze Minoan statuettes, one of which had been identified as being in the Ortiz Collection. The program also revealed that as long ago as 1968, a warrant had been issued in Athens for the arrest of Elia Borowsky for his part in the smuggling of Minoan antiquities but that it had never been followed through and was allowed to lapse. The program further alleged that two Cycladic figures—one in the Met in New York, the other belonging to the Levy-Whites—had been illegally exported from Greece and had passed through Koutoulakis. The source of this information was none other than George Ortiz, who had wanted both objects but failed to get them. The program's fourth segment revealed that, in 1998, the Greek police had been alerted by the German police (in a rerun similar to the cooperation over the raid on Savoca's villa) about an almost intact classical Greek bronze figure of a youth, by the school of Polycleitus, which was on the market in Munich. The Greek police hurried to Germany, where they found that the statue was in the possession of Christoph Leon (who had handled Medici's vases, sold to Berlin) and valued at $6–$7 million. Leon was asking $1 million for his role in the deal, and when the police arrived, the statue was in a box labeled “U.S.A.” They subsequently learned that Marion True, of the Getty, had been to see the statue. However, although the police brought charges against a man called Kotsaridis, who had transferred the object out of Greece (and was sentenced to fifteen years), no proceedings were brought against either Leon or True. Marion True said she had wanted to see the statue out of personal interest and had no intention of buying it.

In 2000, the collection of Attic vases built up by Borowsky was sold at Christie's in New York. This was scarcely surprising to the Greeks since the catalog text for the collection was compiled by Max Bernheimer, head of antiquities at Christie's in New York. None of these vases had any provenance, and they were of exceptional quality. Had any of them been excavated legally, they would without question have been properly published.

Finally, in 2001, the Elia Borowksy Collection went on display at the Karlsruhe Museum (its normal home was the Bible Lands Museum in
Jerusalem, where Borowsky had moved to after he left Canada). This collection, entitled Glories of Ancient Greece, consisted of a large number of superb Cretan objects, of equal quality to the Attic vases. Sakellerakis maintained that on stylistic grounds, most of the Cretan objects could only have come from a tomb in a cemetery at Poros, probably the port of Knossos, the famous site excavated by Arthur Evans. Moreover, they came from a part of the complex only discovered long after 1970.

It is depressing and distressing to see Christie's being drawn into this business alongside Sotheby's. But theirs is the only important new name. Despite the proceedings against Medici, the other members of the cordata are as active as ever.

I
N SOME WAYS, the oddest set of events—the parallel plot that interested Ferri the most—began in the summer of 1999, while he was waiting for the Swiss to make up their minds about whether or not they were going to prosecute Medici. Of course Ferri was interested in prosecuting Medici, Hecht, and Marion True, but the other individual he had most in his sights was the British dealer Robin Symes. Ferri was convinced that Symes did a large amount of business with Medici and had a major role in the triangulations that facilitated smuggling illicit material to the Getty, the Shelby-Whites, Tempelsman, Berlin, and elsewhere. And a major break in the case was imminent: Symes was about to suffer a series of setbacks and disasters that would see his business, his fortune—his entire life—implode in the most devastating way.

On July 4, 1999, Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides were guests at a dinner in Terni, near Arezzo in Italy, given by the American collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White. Toward the end of the dinner, Christo went in search of some cigarettes—and didn't come back. When another guest went to look for him, she found he had slipped on some steps and had hit his head on a portable radiator. He died in hospital in Orvieto the next day.